“Some idea may be formed of the dirtiness of the streets of Paris, towards the end of the fourteenth century, from the words of an ordinance of Charles VI. issued in 1388, ‘And whereas the pavements of Paris are much injured and fallen into decay, so that in many places no horse or carriage can go without very great danger and inconvenience, and whereas this town has long been, and still is, full of dirt, rubbish, and ordure, which each person has left at his own door, so that it is a great horror, and a great displeasure to all persons of respectability and honour, and a great scandal and shame to this city, and a great grief and prejudice to the human beings dwelling in and frequenting the said city, who by the infection of the stinking mass of filth have fallen in times past into great illness and infirmities of body, and great mortality.’ “It must be borne in mind (many other facts prove it),” observes M. Villermé, “that the humble citizens of the present day, artisans for example, are for the most part much better off, as regards air, and those conveniencies which preserve life than persons of much greater wealth were in former times in this capital.” From a passage in Ulpien, it is estimated that the chances of life is in ancient Rome as deduced from the experience of a select class was 30 years. He states, that the first agent to improvement is changing the infected air that they inspired in Paris for air that is pure. In the recent progress of the same change it has been observed there, as in this country, that parts of streets better paved and cleansed are marked by the comparative infrequency of disease. Yet how much remains to be done is shown by the fact that in Paris, with a drier and more salubrious climate, the mortality is still greater than in London; and that the advantages of which M. Villermé justly speaks so highly, are distributed with extreme inequality, is apparent from his tables, which show that in one district the mortality has diminished to 1 in 52; whilst in another it remains as great as 1 in 26 annually. So we have seen that in London it ranges from 1 in 28 to 1 in 57; and it will be seen that in the township of Manchester, a population of nearly 80,000, one twenty-eighth are swept away annually, whilst, in a favoured suburban district, no more than one sixty-third part die.